Jean Rhys was born in Dominica in 1890, the daughter of a Welsh doctor and a white Creole mother. She came to England when she was sixteen, where she trained as an actress and worked on chorus lines. In 1919 she married Jean Lenglet (‘Edward de Nève’), with whom she lived on the Continent until their divorce in 1923. One child from the marriage survived. It was in Paris that she came under the influence of the novelist Ford Madox Ford, who encouraged her to write. Rhys’s first book, a collection of stories called The Left Bank, was published in 1927. This was followed by Quartet (originally Postures, 1928), After Leaving Mr Mackenzie (1930), Voyage in the Dark (1934) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). In 1932, she married Leslie Tilden-Smith, who was a reader with the publisher Hamish Hamilton and acted as her literary agent; he died in 1945. In 1947, she married Max Hamer, Leslie’s cousin. Max was convicted of fraud and as he was moved from prison to prison, Rhys followed him and disappeared from the literary scene. On his release, they moved to a cottage in Devon, where Rhys was rediscovered in 1958. She had begun work on a Dominica-based novel on her return from a visit there in 1936; despite poverty and ill-health, but with the support of her editor, Diana Athill, this would be published as Wide Sargasso Sea in 1966. The novel was Rhys’s response to Jane Eyre and was a sensational comeback. It won literary prizes on publication and is today recognized as her masterpiece. Rhys wrote two further story collections, Tigers are Better-Looking (1968) and Sleep It Off Lady (1976). She died in 1979, and her unfinished autobiography, Smile Please, was published posthumously the same year.
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First published by André Deutsch LTD 1979
Published in Penguin Classics 1990
Reissued 2016
Copyright © The Estate of the late Jean Rhys, 1979
Foreword copyright © Diana Athill, 1979
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover photograph: Jean Rhys with a dog. Jean Rhys archive, Coll. no. 1976.011. Department of Special Collections and University Archives, McFarlin Library, The University of Tulsa. Tulsa, Oklahoma.
ISBN: 978-0-241-28555-8
Jean Rhys began to think of writing an autobiographical book several years before her death on May 14, 1979. The idea did not attract her but because she was sometimes angered and hurt by what other people wrote about her she wanted to get the facts down.
This was not the kind of writing which came to her naturally. When she wrote a novel it was because she had no choice, and she did it – or ‘it happened to her’ – for herself, not for others, in that it was at least partly therapeutic. She describes her first experience of the process in this book and it continued to work more or less like that . . . with the addition of a great deal of slow, meticulous and entirely conscious work which is not described in the chapter ‘World’s End and a Beginning’ because on that particular novel it was still to come. A novel, once it had possessed her, would dictate its own shape and atmosphere, and she could rely on her infallible instinct to tell her what her people would say and do within its framework. In a factual account she would have to rely on memory, not instinct, and this alarmed her. Her honesty was uncommonly strict, so she felt that the only dialogue she could use in such a book would be that which she was perfectly sure she remembered exactly. Except in a few instances, how could she be sure?
A graver problem was that much of her life had already been ‘used up’ in the novels. They were not autobiographical in every detail, as readers sometimes suppose, but autobiographical they were, and their therapeutic function was the purging of unhappiness. Asked during a radio interview whether she had come to hate men, Jean Rhys replied in a shocked voice ‘Oh no!’ The interviewer said this surprised him because most of the unhappiness in her life must have come from men. Jean answered that perhaps the reason was that the sad parts of her life had been written out. Once something had been written out, she said, it was done with and one could start again from the beginning. Much of the material she would have to consider in an autobiographical book had been disposed of in this way, so that raking over its remains would be unbearably tedious.
The solution towards which she slowly worked her way was that she would not attempt a continuous narrative but would catch the past here and there, at points where it happened to crystallise into vignettes. The stories in Sleep It Off, Lady, and their arrangement in chronological order, were an approach to this method, although it was only after they had been written that she saw they could be so treated. Three years before her death she began deliberately to pursue vignettes for the present book.
By that time she was eighty-six and old age was treating her harshly. She had a heart condition which made her quickly exhausted by any kind of effort, so that she could work only for an hour or two at a time, with long intervals between sessions; and her hands were so crippled that it was almost impossible for her to use a pen. A tape-recorder seemed to her an actively hostile device, so there was nothing for it but dictating to a person – very difficult for someone as private as Jean Rhys. Fortunately she was able to find sympathetic helpers, none more so than her friend David Plante, the novelist. During the winters of 1976, 1977 and 1978, which she spent (as she usually did) in London, he devoted a great deal of time, tact and affectionate concern to taking down her words, typing them out, discussing them and reading them back to her for revision. She also accepted advice from him on the arrangement of some of the material. Without him she could not have completed the first part of the book, as she did. Nor would she have begun to put the material for the second part in order.
The first part is the account of her childhood in Dominica to which she gave the title Smile Please. In it the vignettes link up, so that it amounts to an impressionistic picture of those years as a whole, rather than to scenes from them. And from the early part of the book’s fragmentary continuation it can be seen that she was moving away from vignettes, towards continuous narrative, as she went on.
When I say that Jean Rhys completed the first part of her book, I ought to add that no sooner had she sent me the manuscript with a letter saying that it was finished at last, than she took the words back in a following letter: there was, of course, still some revision to be done on Smile Please. We agreed, therefore, that when she came to London in about six weeks’ time, as she was planning to do, we would go through it together so that she could give it the last touches. The fall which led to her death occurred two days before she was to make the journey.
I have no doubt that Jean Rhys would have altered a few words and cut others, but I am equally sure that they would have been very few. I can say this because I was her editor for Wide Sargasso Sea and Sleep It Off, Lady, and I have spoken to people who knew her when she was working on her earlier books. My own experience and their evidence leave me convinced that Jean Rhys allowed no piece of writing to leave her hands until it was finished except for the very smallest details. An example of her perfectionism; some five years after the publication of Wide Sargasso Sea she said to me out of the blue: ‘There is one thing I’ve always wanted to ask you. Why did you let me publish that book?’ Here a gloss is necessary. She was a writer addressing her editor – a writer hampered by unusually beautiful manners. For ‘let me publish’ you must read ‘badger me into publishing’ – an unfair accusation as it happens. I was indignant when I asked her what on earth she meant. ‘It was not finished,’ she said coldly. She then pointed out the existence in the book of two unnecessary words. One was ‘then’, the other ‘quite’.
I was not insincere when I apologised for failing to notice those words. Such an exemplary stylist as Jean Rhys has a right to demand infallible vigilance from an editor. So now I apologise to her for whatever unnecessary words there are in Smile Please – although I would hesitate to remove them even if I noticed them, now that she is no longer here to give her permission.
The second half of this volume, to which I have given the title It began to grow cold, consists of material which does not claim to be finished. It amounts to being some, and only some, of what she wanted to say in the form of first drafts, or notes towards first drafts, ending in 1923, just before she met Ford Madox Ford and began, with his encouragement, to write for publication. She intended to work on it when she had rested for a while after completing Smile Please, but her increasing weakness during the last winter of her life prevented it. An appendix was written with her own hand: ‘From a diary’, which she had kept for about thirty years. She dug it out towards the end of her work with David Plante, hoping to fit it in to the book if she could see how. A small part of what she dictated is so scrappy that it is confusing, and this I have omitted. Having available two versions of some of the material, the second of which she had agreed with David Plante was preferable to the first, I took the liberty on one occasion – the passage on page 104 about accepting money – of restoring a few words of her first version; I moved the joke about actors and fish (page 94) to a position where it seemed to fit better; and I quite often altered the punctuation resulting from the rhythms of her dictation to something nearer the punctuation characteristic of her other prose. Here and there I deleted words such as ‘very’ or ‘quite’ or ‘I thought’, so sure did I feel that Jean would have done so had she been able to revise the passage concerned.
She did not get far enough with this second part of the book, dealing with her life after her arrival in England at the age of sixteen, to put the record straight in the ways she had intended. The reason why it sometimes needs straightening is that because her novels are so obviously autobiographical, readers suppose them to be more so than they are. A typical example of this occurred in one of her obituary notices where it was stated that her first husband, Jean Lenglet, was imprisoned for robbery. It was Stephan Zelli in Quartet who was imprisoned for robbery; Jean Lenglet was not. When the French police arrested him in 1923 and extradited him to his native Holland, he was charged not with robbery but with an offence against currency regulations (in Jean Rhys’s view, ‘really very unfair because everyone was doing it’), and with entering France illegally.
What Jean Rhys used to say about the relationship between her life and her novels only confirms what is understood by most writers and students of writing, but perhaps it is worth recalling here. All her writing, she used to say, started out from something that had happened, and her first concern was to get it down as accurately as possible. But ‘I like shape very much’ – and again, ‘a novel has to have a shape, and life doesn’t have any’. If the novel was going to work, then it would soon start to have its own shape (her feeling seemed to be that the novel had it, rather than that she imposed it). Then she would be compelled to leave out things that had happened, or to put things in; to increase this or diminish that – all this to suit the shape and nature of the work of art which was forming out of the original experience. With Jean Rhys the process never took her a great distance from the experience – indeed, truth to its essence was vital to the therapeutic function of the work as well as to its value to other people – but it took her far enough to leave booby traps for the unwary. Mistakes made on the evidence provided by the novels may be hard to excuse but are understandable. Less so are wild guesses. In his biography of Ford Madox Ford, for example, Arthur Mizener has a note which Jean Rhys saw as implying that she had a child by Ford. Jean had two children, both by Jean Lenglet: a son born in 1920 who died soon after birth, and a daughter born in 1922, who survives her.
That Jean Lenglet was the father of both her children is something which I know, from conversations with Jean, she wanted to say; and I can assume from other things she told me that it would have distressed her to see him described as a robber. What else she particularly wanted to include under the heading of record-straightening I do not know. I have, however, agreed with her daughter and with other close friends of hers that the following short chronology will be a useful supplement to It began to grow cold.
1890(?) Birth of Ella Gwendolen Rees Williams, who was to use several names before she settled on Jean Rhys. There has been confusion about her age because she disliked revealing it. The date 1894, which appears in Who’s Who, was supplied by her. But an old passport gives 1890 – and a cousin of hers, now dead, once told me that as children they often used to comment on her being ‘ten years older than the century’.
1907 Left Dominica to attend the Perse School, Cambridge, where she spent only one term.
1908 Left school for the Academy of Dramatic Art (not then known as RADA because it was not yet ‘Royal’). Death of her father. Left the Academy for the chorus line.
1909 First love affair, which lasted eighteen months.
1919 Went to Holland to marry Jean Lenglet.
1920 Birth of their son William who died three weeks later.
1922 Birth of their daughter Maryvonne.
1923 Jean Lenglet’s arrest on a charge of illegal entry into France and of offending against currency regulations while in Vienna. He had obtained a post there in March 1920 with the Interallied Disarmament Commission, and Jean Rhys had spent several months with him there and in Budapest. Jean Lenglet was extradited to Holland.
1927 Met Leslie Tilden Smith.
1932 Divorce from Jean Lenglet. Marriage to Leslie Tilden Smith. Her daughter says of the next six years: ‘It was agreed that I would stay in Holland for my schooling, both my father and my mother providing the money. My holidays were spent with my mother – marvellous, with everything a child could wish for: books, ballet, music, pantomimes, circus, in summer camping and caravanning and summer places on the Thames. This arrangement continued until the outbreak of the war when I chose to go back to Holland.’
1945 Death of Leslie Tilden Smith.
1947 Marriage to Max Hamer.
1953 Went with Max Hamer to live in Cornwall.
1956 Moved to Cheriton FitzPaine in Devonshire, where she spent the rest of her life.
1964 Death of Max Hamer.
1979 Death of Ella Gwendolen Hamer, Jean Rhys, on May 14.
This is a short version of a story which has often been told, included because newcomers to the work of Jean Rhys may find it interesting. She published five books before the Second World War. They were admired by critics but made little impression on the general public. After the appearance of Good Morning, Midnight in 1939 she vanished from the literary scene (to which she never conspicuously ‘belonged’) so completely that people supposed her to be dead. By the end of the war few people remembered her books; but one who did, Francis Wyndham, worked for a time as literary adviser to this firm and drew my attention to them. I shall never forget hearing Jean Rhys’s voice for the first time in the old copies of Good Morning, Midnight and Voyage in the Dark lent me by Francis in – I think – 1955.
It was Francis Wyndham who read in the Radio Times that the BBC had been advertising for information about Jean Rhys, in connection with a radio dramatisation of Good Morning, Midnight, and that she herself had answered the advertisement. He obtained her address and wrote to tell her how much he admired her work. She let him know that she was writing a new novel, Wide Sargasso Sea (although she had not yet found that title for it), whereupon he offered on our behalf to buy an option on this novel. At that point – it was in May 1957 – I wrote the first of the many letters Jean and I were to exchange. I proposed that after the publication of the new novel we should, if all went well, reissue some or all of her earlier books.
Seven years went by before Wide Sargasso Sea was so nearly finished that Jean Rhys was ready to bring it up to London and explain to a typist the two or three very small alterations she still wanted to make. It took so long because her husband had fallen ill and her life had been so difficult that writing was often out of the question. I knew from her letters how near she had been to despair; and I knew from the batches of material I had seen on their way to the typist how triumphantly she had prevailed over it, so the prospect of this first meeting was a moving one. We planned to share a bottle of champagne over lunch.
Instead, we had to travel together to a hospital in an ambulance: no sooner did Jean arrive in London than she had a heart attack.
She was to remain physically frail for the remaining fourteen years of her life, and for the first two years after the attack she was so weak and so despondent that she felt unable to do even the tiny amount of work on Wide Sargasso Sea that still remained to be done. This was a frustrating period for us, her publishers. We had in our hands the manuscript of a beautiful novel which only its author could see to be unfinished, but she had made me promise that I would not publish it, or let it be published, until she had given her permission.
This she did at last because of a dream. She wrote to tell me that she had been having a recurring dream in which, to her dismay, she was pregnant. Then it came again, only this time the baby had been born and she was looking at it in its cradle – ‘such a puny weak thing. So the book must be finished, and that must be what I think about it really. I don’t dream about it any more.’
Wide Sargasso Sea was enthusiastically received by the public as well as by the critics. It won the W. H. Smith Literary Award and an award from the Royal Society of Literature, and we followed its publication by reissuing all her earlier books except for The Left Bank. In 1978 Jean Rhys was awarded the CBE for her services to literature.
Recognition came late – too late to give her much lively pleasure although she was glad of the modest financial security it brought with it. Many of the forms it took were unimportant to her. The recognition an artist values most highly is that which comes from her or his peers, and Jean Rhys did not have many of those. One can only hope that at the end she drew private satisfaction from having so fully – to use her own phrase, on page 147 – earned death.
May, 1979
‘Smile please,’ the man said. ‘Not quite so serious.’
He’d dodged out from behind the dark cloth. He had a yellow black face and pimples on his chin.
I looked down at my white dress, the one I had got for my birthday, and my legs and the white socks coming half way up my legs, and the black shiny shoes with the strap over the instep.
‘Now,’ the man said.
‘Keep still,’ my mother said.
I tried but my arm shot up of its own accord.
‘Oh what a pity, she moved.’
‘You must keep still,’ my mother said, frowning.
The chosen photograph in a silver frame stood on a small table under the sitting-room jalousies of our house in Roseau. It pleased me that it was by itself, not lost among the other photographs in the room, of which there were many. Then I forgot it.
It was about three years afterwards that one early morning, dressed for school, I came downstairs before anyone else and for some reason looked at the photograph attentively, realising with dismay that I wasn’t like it any longer. I remembered the dress she was wearing, so much prettier than anything I had now, but the curls, the dimples surely belonged to somebody else. The eyes were a stranger’s eyes. The forefinger of her right hand was raised as if in warning. She had moved after all. Why I didn’t know, she wasn’t me any longer. It was the first time I was aware of time, change and the longing for the past. I was nine years of age.
Catching sight of myself in the long looking-glass I felt despair. I had grown into a thin girl, tall for my age. My straight hair was pulled severely from my face and tied with a black ribbon. I was fair with a pale skin and huge staring eyes of no particular colour. My brothers and sisters all had brown eyes and hair, why was I singled out to be the only fair one, to be called Gwendolen which means ‘white’ in Welsh I was told? I was wearing an ugly brown holland dress, the convent uniform, and from my head to my black stockings which fell untidily round my ankles, I hated myself.
At the convent I had noticed that some of the girls’ stockings were smooth, tightly stretched, and at last I plucked up enough courage to ask one of them how she managed it. She answered in that impatient, unwilling, secretive voice girls sometimes use to each other: ‘Your garters are too slack.’
I borrowed a needle and strong cotton, went into the room where we left our hats and sewed a large tuck in each garter. Now, though not so smooth as some of the others, my stockings were passable. But as soon as I got home my mother noticed the change and objected so strongly to my wearing anything tight round my knees that I had to take the tucks out. Again my black stockings drooped.
After this I became one of the untidiest girls in the convent. Only one other was worse. She was Portuguese, called Gussie de Freitas, a most slovenly child and the despair of the nuns. Walking home down the hill away from the convent I would hear derisive shouts of ‘Gussie, Gussie!’
Gussie had, like me, long straight yellow hair and eyes of my shape but black. She tried to make friends with me, perhaps she thought that outcasts should stick together, but I preferred being an outcast by myself and would have nothing to do with her though I took a perverse pleasure in trying to outdo her untidiness. I would lose my hair ribbon and come home with hair falling about my face and fingers stained with ink. If I wore a clean dress on Monday, by Tuesday it was spotted and creased. I was really rather miserable but took a defiant pride in looking worse every day. However I always endeavoured to get into the house and tidy up a bit before my mother saw me. I was afraid of her.
I never looked at my photograph again but I often thought of it. Over and over I would remember that magic dress. It had been given to me on my sixth birthday which had been spent at Bona Vista. But Bona Vista too had vanished.
When my father had been for a very few years in the small West Indian island of Dominica, he was optimistic enough to buy two estates in the hills (they were called estates then). Optimistic because, being a doctor, he spent his life working in the town and the districts near it, and neither of his purchases was a paying proposition. The larger of the two, Bona Vista, was very beautiful, wild, lonely, remote. From the windows of the shabby white house you could see a range of mountains; the highest, Morne Diablotin, then slightly lower Morne Anglais, Morne Collé Anglais, Morne Bruce. (In the French West Indies mountains are called Mornes and Dominica had once been French.) We believed, or I believed, that Diablotin was 8,000 feet high and that it had never been climbed because the summit was rock. Round it flew large black birds called Diablotins (devil birds) found nowhere else in the West Indies or the world. The top was usually covered in mist.
The other mountains were clear and we could see the rain coming and run for shelter before it fell. We were always there in August, the month of storms, much thunder and lightning,